Jared L Talley was born and raised in rural Idaho and now seeks to help these communities adapt and thrive in a changing world. He is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies in Boise State University’s School of Public Service and a policy consultant for the Idaho Governor’s Office of Species Conservation. An environmental philosopher by training and an interdisciplinary scholar in practice, his work seeks to better understand how communities relate to the land and how this poses obstacles and opportunities for collaboration and governance. Particularly, he studies the role of science in collaborative policy, the role of place in environmental identity, and the role of the imagination in mediating both.
1. What type(s) of civically engaged or public philosophy (CE/PP) work do you do?
Broadly, I work with rural communities, state and federal agencies, and non-governmental organizations in the Intermountain West to enact collaborative environmental governance. The work ranges from salmon restoration efforts and predator/livestock conflicts to grazing permit renewals and wildfire mitigation. You’ll often find me in any conversation where rural communities, policy, and environmental conservation in the arid lands of the West intersect.
2. Give an example of a successful project.
Success is tricky – it often requires an objective. My work is in highly conflicted areas and very rarely is there an action that everybody considers successful. For me, I always consider my engagement a success when the conversation turns toward reflecting on the collaborative process itself and the people I’m working with start recognizing the competing (and often hidden) values that are hindering the process. I suppose success, to me, is pushing the inquiry into places that help the group come together.
3. What motivates you to do this work?
I grew up between the rural and urban West. I was told (sometimes explicitly) that environmental conflict was just part of Western landscapes; we must choose our community, draw our lines, and stand firm in our positions. I grew up in Idaho’s deserts and mountains and loved them…but I also grew up loving the communities that use these lands to support their communities[JMG1] . In essence, I could never find a position that I could stand firm in. So I’m motivated to help people come together and work across these imagined boundaries to find ways to help the land while sustaining the communities on the land. I’m motivated to do it because I love this place and want to help think through what it means to live and thrive in the West.
4. In what ways does the work inform your research (or vice-versa)?
I’m not sure that I could actually delineate my community engaged work from my research. A lot of my research is about the collaborative process itself, so its fairly obvious how they interact. But it’s more than that – my research gives me space to think through the challenges I see arising in the field, and my engaged work gives me space to put lessons learned from research into practice. This “putting into practice” is the experimental stage – I get to see what works and what doesn’t which I then take back to my research. It’s an iterative process that, for me, requires both research and practice.
5. In what ways does the work inform your teaching (or vice-versa)?
My research, teaching, and engaged work are all intertwined. Collaboration is fundamentally about learning and working together and this is how I approach my classroom. I structure my classrooms around live problems in the region and we work as a class to develop different perspectives around the problems while learning ways to navigate the tensions that arise. We focus on tensions in the content itself as well as those that arise from the way that the social discourse is structured. I’ve been experimenting with an ungraded classroom with the explicit acknowledgment that it is more like a real-world collaboration and we should practice working together on complex problems. Again, I’m iteratively researching, experimenting, and modelling collaboration in everything I do…and it always helps me recommend and place my students in environmental internships and careers!
6. What’s the philosophical grounding of your CE/PP work?
It is probably unsurprising, but my philosophical grounding is in pragmatism. The community discourse, interdisciplinary, problem-based nature of my work aligns with the commitments of pragmatism. However, I also draw from phenomenology. Pragmatism takes the role of human experience seriously and I find that phenomenology helps me to understand this role better. In my engaged work, I focus on how the experience of collaboration and the experience of the natural environments that we are working to conserve impacts the discourse around the problem. My research activities take this seriously, and in more philosophically-minded groups we’ll talk through these dimensions before working on the policy/management dimensions. I find that this helps to de-center entrenched positions and open the conversation to a vulnerability that helps people build relationships.
7. How do you motivate yourself to do CE/PP work in times of political or personal struggle?
To be honest, I’m not very good at motivating myself in times of struggle. I will always follow up on my commitments to the community, so making promises works for me when there are extenuating factors that require me to be engaged. But in times of struggle, I find that I shy away from making promises – in short, I disengage. I think this is important, however. If I can’t bring my full self to the work, then I risk hurting more than I’m helping. There are times when I back off for months, and there are times where I’m doing the work daily. I’d suspect that with some reflection, I’d realize that these times map onto the ebbs and flows in my own personal life and have been a way to keep myself healthy. I might say that to engage well is to also know when to disengage well.
8. How does your CE/PP work inspire you?
I suspect that I would be wholly uninspired without my engaged work. I don’t mean to sound so cynical but disconnected academic learning just doesn’t do it for me. I feel inspired when I see a community project come to fruition; the pride that everyone feels that something big was accomplished and the joy in watching the land respond to change. I feel inspired when I learn from the practitioners around me and find ways that I can help the group move forward. In a very real sense, my engaged work gives meaning to my academic work and this meaning is critical to my inspiration to do both.
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